I have been pondering a technique in Solidworks for a little
while
now (since March), and have yet to come up with a good answer.

After hearing multiple people on this forum ask about how to
properly "wrap" text/etc. I though I would try and
take it a step further, and wrap both along the X, and then the Y.
To analyze this question, I imported a bitmap map of the
earth. Then I traced over all the continents (except
Antarctica, lets not get ahead of ourselves), and tried to
"wrap" this around the globe. I tried a few
techniques, but none of mine worked. I then thought about
this (for months) but have come up with nothing.

Thus I pose this as a challenge. Whoever can create the best
looking model of earth will win. If any entries are actually
received, they will be judged first on "best practices"
for Solidworks techniques, then on accuracy to the real globe.
PhotoWorks tools are not required. Submittals (posts on
this forum) are due Thursday the 23rd. Friday I will decide
the winner, or maybe add a poll to decide the winner. It just
depends if anyone is interested enough in my little contest.

I couldn't decide if anyone would care enough to do something like
this without a prize, so I have a completely new Solidworks
button-up shirt, men's small, dark blue. I have to note,
however, that it is bigger than most smalls, so it may qualify as
actually a medium. I am not associated with Solidworks, nor
is this contest; so I'm sorry, that prize is all that I have to
offer.

I have included with this post my early workings, and the earth
image that I used. Note that you will have to stretch and
crop it to actually fit on a globe, and even then it won't be quite
right. I started to create a spline by doing a good job of
North and South America, but the other continents were a very rough
approximation.

Good luck, and I'm interested to see how people approach this
problem!

Charles,
I must decline your offer.
I happen to be an "Extra-Lardy" and could not squeeze into a size
small shirt.
Hey wait a minute, maybe if I used a stretch & crop routine I
could get it on. Okay, I'm in. I start working on something this
weekend.

Well, Thank you to both Matt and James for their
submittalsso far. They both used techniques that I didn't
think of. I want to give special Kudos to James, as
using"Flex" never even entered my mind. I will have tocopy
over my sketch to your file (in 2007) and see how that
looks. Very creative!

After reviewing both the contributions from Matt Lombard and
JamesHutchins, I can say that James's technique can result in a
moreaccurate mapping of a globe. Congratulations to James!

What James did that made his the winner:
1. He used the wrap feature for the first direction.
2. Then he used a Flex feature, with the Bending function
tocomplete the sphere.

Why this is the best solution so far:
Well, it solved one of the big problems that I was running in
to (alimit of the tools in SW I was using), which is how to
handlethings close to the North and South Poles. Points far
fromthe equator will not be represented properly by and
extrude. The cylinder is only tangent to the sphere at the
equator,and the farther from the equator you get, the more skewed
itbecomes. With the bending tool, these problems
areaccounted for in the flex!

Matt's technique used a wrap on a cylinder, then a Ruled
surface to"cut" inwards, and define the continents shapes (and
usedsplit line, not a real cut). This is the path that I
wastrying to take, although Matt did take it a good step forward.
Iwould not have used the ruled surface; the ruled surface tool is
alot easier than what I was going to try!

I am swamped at work, but I hope to upload a finished model,
basedon a much tighter tolerance to the continents than James used.

Thus the contest is officially ended, but if anyone has
moretechniques to create text/sketches from a flat plane on a
sphere,please post!

I have actually looked into it further. Ironically enough, I am
currently trying to design a piece of spherical metal to be laser
cut in the shape of the continents. So it is no longer just an
experiment in SolidWorks, I actually have parts I want to
fabricate. I believe that the best result will be from the method I
describe below, but after trying it myself I got poor results:

After gathering the proper maps, I made a sphere with planes that
matched the projections from the VUT website above. I then pasted
those into the model, and tried to map them onto the sphere.
Unfortunately, my approach was mathematically incorrect. I either
have an improper understanding of how the projections work, or I am
applying it incorrectly (or both).

So with that, I have attached a .zip of my progress so far. If
anyone has any further insight, or knows what I did incorrectly,
please let me know. This is still quite the challenge!

Charles,
I think you're pretty close. However, instead of extruding your
surfaces, I believe you need to loft them to the origin. I think
all of these projections are done as though you were holding
photographic film at the surface of the globe and a light shines
from the center. The only question is whether it's a cylindrical
projection or a planar projection. Your standard world map is made
as though you had photographic film wrapped around the globe at the
equator into a cylinder. This is why the lines of latitude are
further apart toward the poles, and the lines of longitude are
straight. I'm not sure how they do localized maps. I guess you'd
have to have some lat/long lines on the map to see what they looked
like. I imagine they do them as though you were holding a planar
piece of film tangent to the center of the area of interest, again
with the light coming from the center of the globe.

I like your thinking, but in my current model, you will notice that
Africa is significantly smaller than it is supposed to be. Thus
"lofting inwards" would create an even smaller Africa.

So, I'm not challenging your underlying premise, but there is at
least something else that I am not understanding here.

*Edit: Also, as an extra Bonus, If you installed the proper scene
for Mark Biasotti's "space station", then the Earth will look like
it is out in space. Yup, I took this to a whole new level of
geekyness.

Hey Josh, something just doesn't sit right with me about that
approach just above.
What if the pole were added? That method wouldn't work with showing
correct land bounderies at the poles as far as I can tell.

That's why world maps don't/cant show the poles. A flat map
of the world horribly distorts the shape/size of land masses far
from the equator. Just look at Greenland vs. Australia. Australia
is smaller than Greenland on a flat world map, but in reality it's
much larger.

Looking at the sketch you used for Africa, I can see why
Africa is too small. This projection sort of "squishes" everything
toward the center. The lat/long lines on these maps really help you
visualize what's going on. For example, if you were really looking
at a physical globe in this orientation, the latitude lines would
look much more straight.

The map view you want to use for this is the orthographic
projection rather than azimuthal equidistant. Orthographic should
actually give you a totally accurate map for the straight extrusion
method you are using as long as you can get enough views of the
different land masses.

Your technique works great. I also have the problem that I don't
have Photoworks. I can, however, apply a texture appearance of an
image. I was never able to find one that accurately covered the
north and south poles.

Josh,

You are correct. I thought I was using the correct projection to
just use a straight extrusion. I was unable to find the proper
projection, can you do a "proof of concept" to show that yours is
correct?

No problem, Charles. Attached is the (very quick) Africa
proof of concept. The only thing I changed from your method was
that I used the "Orthographic projection" image rather than the
"Azimuthal Equidistant" that you used. According to some very brief
research, the African continent takes up about 5.9% of the earth's
surface. The Africa model attached takes up 5.9% of the sphere
surface. If you compare the orthographic and azumuthal equidistant
picutes, you will see that the orthographic looks much more like
what you see when you look at a desk globe from a distance.
Projecting the orthographic orthographically back onto a sphere
will give you a perfect outline on the sphere. If you could somehow
get these same images at 3-4 times the resolution and use the new
Auto-Trace feature you could really get pretty accurate!

I think I was wrong about Auto-Trace. It doesn't seem to work
all that great. I thought I would try to do the whole globe at once
(well, except Antarctica) with a nice big cylindrical projection
line drawing map. My idea was to plop in the sketch, use Auto-Trace
to get the entire thing at once, and get the full globe in 5
features or so. On the surface this seems like the ideal
application for Auto-Trace. Unfortunately, it seems that Auto-Trace
is a huge memory hog. I get the "Unable to obtain sufficient
memory" immediately if I try to trace anything more than just North
America. After tracing North America I can't go back and mess with
the picture at all without running out of memory. The trace isn't
all that great either. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong. Here's what I
was working with if anyone's interested.

Thanks, Dan, I had pretty much come to that conclusion as
well. However, I was previously under the impression that this sort
of thing was
exactly what AutoTrace was for! To remove the tedium or
increase the accuracy of tracing a sketch picture. If it does
neither of these, what's the point?

- created sphere
- applied specular map from
here
- first 3d sketch: multiple lines, beginning from the centre of the
sphere, going to the continents outlines, end point related to the
sphere's surface
- second 3d sketch: spline, connecting the points
- 2d-sketch: on an offset plane, converted entities from second 3d
sketch
- projected curve from sketch1 to the sphere's surface
- third 3dsketch from curve1
- surface fill from third 3dsketch

lol

Been too lazy to do other continents... But it could work pretty
well this way

Yay moi! Glad it worked for you. Funny that the final
direction ended up being more a question of getting the right map
picture to start with rather than a technical trick in SW. Straight
planar projection onto a sphere is pretty boring!

I have been pondering a technique in Solidworks for a little
while
now (since March), and have yet to come up with a good answer.

After hearing multiple people on this forum ask about how to
properly "wrap" text/etc. I though I would try and
take it a step further, and wrap both along the X, and then the Y.
To analyze this question, I imported a bitmap map of the
earth. Then I traced over all the continents (except
Antarctica, lets not get ahead of ourselves), and tried to
"wrap" this around the globe. I tried a few
techniques, but none of mine worked. I then thought about
this (for months) but have come up with nothing.

Thus I pose this as a challenge. Whoever can create the best
looking model of earth will win. If any entries are actually
received, they will be judged first on "best practices"
for Solidworks techniques, then on accuracy to the real globe.
PhotoWorks tools are not required. Submittals (posts on
this forum) are due Thursday the 23rd. Friday I will decide
the winner, or maybe add a poll to decide the winner. It just
depends if anyone is interested enough in my little contest.

I couldn't decide if anyone would care enough to do something like
this without a prize, so I have a completely new Solidworks
button-up shirt, men's small, dark blue. I have to note,
however, that it is bigger than most smalls, so it may qualify as
actually a medium. I am not associated with Solidworks, nor
is this contest; so I'm sorry, that prize is all that I have to
offer.

I have included with this post my early workings, and the earth
image that I used. Note that you will have to stretch and
crop it to actually fit on a globe, and even then it won't be quite
right. I started to create a spline by doing a good job of
North and South America, but the other continents were a very rough
approximation.

Good luck, and I'm interested to see how people approach this
problem!